The youngest generation in the U.S. is entering adulthood as the country's most racially and ethnically diverse generation and is on its way to becoming the best educated generation yet, according to a Pew Research Center report released Thursday.

Early in the Trump administration, senior officials discussed bringing back a controversial question topic that has not been included in the census for all households since 1950 — U.S. citizenship status.

The policy idea became reality this March, when — against the recommendations of the Census Bureau — Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross used his authority over the census and approved plans to add the question, "Is this person a citizen of the United States?"

The Supreme Court has temporarily shielded Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross from having to sit for questioning under oath in the lawsuits over a controversial citizenship question the Trump administration added to the 2020 census.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to make its main official behind the 2020 census citizenship question — Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross — available to testify out of court for the lawsuits over the hotly contested question.

During a court hearing at Manhattan federal court on Friday, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman set the tentative start date for Nov. 5, adding that his "strong instinct" is that the two cases before him require a courtroom trial before he can issue a ruling.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and his staff prepared to embark on a legal fight that would take them to the highest court in the U.S. long before announcing the controversial decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

A federal judge in Maryland is allowing a lawsuit over the hotly contested citizenship question on the 2020 census to proceed, bringing the total number of lawsuits judges have greenlighted despite the Trump administration's efforts to get them tossed out of court to five.

The legal fight over the controversial citizenship question on the 2020 census is likely to continue at San Francisco federal court.

"I believe the case will proceed," U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg said Friday during a hearing on whether to dismiss two of the lawsuits against the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which oversees the census.

A group of Democratic senators have introduced a bill on Tuesday that would require the U.S. census and the country's largest survey to start directly asking about sexual orientation and gender identity.

If the Census Equality Act becomes law, sexual orientation and gender identity questions would have to be added to forms for the census by 2030 and for the American Community Survey — a survey that about 1 in 38 households are required by federal law to complete every year — by 2020.

Months before the Justice Department submitted a formal request for a citizenship question, pressure to add one to the 2020 census was mounting from a powerful decision-maker behind the national head count: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.

The U.S. Census Bureau has stopped plans to form a new committee of advisers for the upcoming 2020 census, according to a letter obtained by NPR.

The decision comes as the agency prepares for the once-a-decade head count of every person living in the country while battling multiple lawsuits over a new citizenship question and cybersecurity concerns about the first U.S. census to allow all households to respond online. Similar advisory committees were put in place before the national head counts in 2000 and 2010.

A few months after he started leading the Commerce Department, Secretary Wilbur Ross became impatient. As a powerful decider for the U.S. census, he had a keen interest in adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census as soon as possible.